I was cleaning my old notes and found a paper where I had noted these from the book ’Theoretical Practice’ by David Chipperfield. One of the few texts written by Chipperfield. This was when I was a student and had just discovered Chipperfield. I was intrigued then by the title of the book, as one would always associate with the likes of Tschumi and Eisenmann for architects inclined towards theory. This tone of the text felt different for ’theory’. It was more crisp and basic. I could understand what I read for a change (which was unusual compared to other theory texts). I am so thrilled to see these notes for two reasons. My interest in Chipperfield is still very alive, reminding the ideal-seeking-mindset of college days. The second reason is the much needed reminder “architecture is (only) the backdrop of our life” (only added by me). I always refer to this another quote of Chipperfield that ’scale’ and ’time’ are our enemies, but was never  able to place the source. It is a relief now. This book has been out of print for sometime. This piece of note and what it articulates is important reminder for me. I am delighted that I had written this down around a decade back and reassures the need for reading and writing.

“Once we accept that architecture is capable of changing little, we can consider it as real power. The questions architecture can pose are limited, and architecture cannot, by definition, provide answers. Architecture is the backdrop of life and has, as such, the possibility of influencing the way we act. It can make our lives much easier and can offer a vision of order in the world of chaos. It can remind us of simple values. It can make our world more material and bring us in touch with the very elements it shelters us from. It can heighten our senses, our anticipation and experience”

“Its modest ambition is to make the spaces we inhabit more beautiful and the thing we touch more meaningful. The power of architecture is to be silently profound”

“We need to find ideas and clues in the resolution of the simple and everyday problems, to avoid the spectacular in order to make the everyday special. In this vision the simple decisions become the most critical, the margins become more central, in making architecture in which, while questioning the way we act, affirms values and resolves contradictions”

“Our enemies are ‘scale’ and ‘time'”

In this other drawing below for the competition, I tried to mark the public buildings ( library, dining, etc) along the spine, which would release to a large vista of open space. A strategy to both control and establish the scale of the campus and also to interrupt the length of the spine to articulate its linear experience.

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02.

I am sharing an extract here from Paul Goldberger’s impeccable explanation of the University of Virginia’s central lawn and the buildings around it. This is from the book “Why Architecture Matters”, a must read anyway. The point to select this piece is not only for the relevance, but also for the delicate and precise description of an architectural space, which is so difficult to describe because of its tectonic nature.

“Designed when (Thomas) Jefferson was seventy four, the “academic village” as he liked to call it, consists of two parallel rows of five classical houses, called pavilions, connected by low, colonnaded walkways, which face each other a wide, magnificently proportioned grassy lawn. At the head of the lawn, presiding over the entire composition, is the Rotunda, a domed structure he based on the Pantheon in Rome.

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The whole place is a lesson, not just in the didactic sense of the classic orders, but in a thousand subtler ways as well. Ultimately the University of Virginia is an essay in balance – balance between the built world and the natural one, between the individual and the community, between the past and the present, between order and freedom. There is order to the buildings, freedom to the lawn itself – but as the buildings order and define and enclose the great open space, so does space makes the buildings sensual and rich. Neither the buildings nor the lawn would have any meaning without the other, and the dialogue they enter into is a sublime composition.

The lawn is terraced, so that it steps down gradually as it moves away from the Rotunda, adding a whole other rhythm to the composition. The lawn is a room, and the sky is the ceiling; I know of few other outdoor places anywhere where the sense of architectural space can be so intensely felt.

In Jefferson’s buildings, there are other kinds of balances as well, between the icy coolness of the white-painted stone and the warm redness of the brick, between the sumptuousness of the Corinthian order and the restraint of the Doric, between the rhythm of the columns, marching on and on down the lawn, and the masses of the pavilions. In the late afternoon light all this can tug at your heart, and you feel that you can touch that light, dancing on those columns, making the brick soft and rich. There is awesome beauty here, but also utter clarity. It becomes clear that Jefferson created both a total abstraction and a remarkably literal expression of the idea. Architecture has rarely been as sure of itself, as creative, as inventive and as relaxed as it is here” ( Pages 13-15)

Some images for below for reference ( Source Archdaily Classics, Photo Credits : Larry Harris)